Sam Broner
2.7K posts
@SamBroner
Generally Happy. Founder @bettermoney_co | prev: investor @a16zcrypto, MIT, eng @Microsoft
a neobank told me this week that one of their infrastructure providers keeps changing operational and compliance reqs on them mid-flight. what stuck with me was that they had almost come to accept it as the status quo. and honestly, that's a rational way to feel given how this industry behaves. but it's worth asking why the ground moves like that. neobanks and financial apps operate on top of banks, card networks, and regulation, and all of them move on their own terms. if you are a neobank, you cant make that complexity disappear. but you can decide who you build on, and how much of that complexity ends up reaching your users. when the infrastructure foundation is thin, every change gets passed straight through to you, and then to your users. when the foundation is built to take more weight, more of that volatility gets held before it reaches the surface. nobody absorbs all of it, and anyone who says they have solved this is selling something. by the way, some of it is not the ground moving at all. it's the infrastructure provider learning something late that they should have understood up front, and passing the cost of that discovery back to you. that's the work that rarely shows up in a demo, but shows up everywhere in the customer experience.
i framed a colorful e ink on my wall to display a collage of any birds that have passed by my window today
